Essays of a Liberal Arts Education

Looking back at my time on William and Mary I’ve come to appreciate just how lucky I am to have been a part of a true liberal arts education. Nothing could probably spell this out more than some of the essay titles of things I have written over my past three and a half years here. Though some may seem utterly random, every single essay you write at William and Mary enhances your ability to synthesize concepts, articulate clearly, reason logically, and argue effectively. Within the liberal arts, the skills that you learn in particular classes are meant to transcend the boundaries of that discipline and contribute to your overall skill at expressing yourself.

Here are some I’ve been able to do over my time at the College in Sophomore, Junior, and the first part of Senior year:

• The Language of Consumerism: What the Doctrine of Foreign Equivalents tells us about foreign language assumptions in U.S. trademark law
• “Gotta Catch ‘Em All” – Pokemon as an Avatar for Japanese Culture Abroad
• Burgers, Ramen, and the Cooking Up of National Identity
• A Conditioned Kind of Luxury
• Those Who Own Language: A Critique of the Liberal View of Language Ownership versus Mother-Tongue Theory
• Why Judges Should Ignore Dictionaries: The Role of Expert Linguistic Testimony in Court
• The Problem with Orthodox Linguistics
• The Commodification of the Public Sphere: Trademarks as Potent, Uncontested Signs
• A Grammatical Sketch of Cantonese
• The Grammar of Tamil
• An Analysis of Conversation: Theoretical Paradigms for Talk-in-Interaction
• On How Humans Greet One Another
• Recognizing Language Change and Establishing Classification Thresholds
• The Role of the State Legislative Caucus: Comparative Value in Soliciting from Individuals versus Corporations or PACs
• The Case Against Summer Vacation: Why Our Break Enhances the American Achievement Gap
• The Network-Centric Model of Intelligence
• Trends of HIV/AIDS – Implications for National Security
• Why We Need Juries for Criminal Cases in the United States
• I Might Could Tree That: How Standard Generative Syntax Copes with Non-Standard Vernacular
• Cross-Linguistic Noun Phrase Structures in English, Thai, Burmese, and Vietnamese
• An Assessment of Bi-Modal Cognitive Bilingualism
• HB 1696: Why Virginia Universities Need our Out of State Students
• The Prescriptive Tradition in Historical Linguistics
• Optimality Theory and Stress in Lenakel
• Assessing a State’s Legislative Right to Ban Surrogate Parenting
• A Critique of Just War Theory
• The Unlikely Story of Discourse Within the American Fraternity: An Analysis and Discussion of All-Male Linguistic Interaction
• Old English to Middle English: A Lecture

Hark Upon the Liberal Arts,

Brian